A couple of months ago, I suggested that sheer star power alone made Date Night worth checking out. While poor writing and an incredibly generic plot could have killed that movie, Steve Carell and Tina Fey managed to make the proceedings watchable. Now, Carell is trying to pull this task off a second time in the same year, only instead of Fey, he has the gifted Paul Rudd by his side. Despite a valiant effort put forth by this hilarious duo, Dinner For Schmucks sinks in a sea of its own banal stupidity. Perhaps that statement makes the film sound worse than it actually is. This movie does have laughs and some of them are pretty big but the jokes that do work are completely undermined by the miserable gags that fall flat. In Dinner For Schmucks, Paul Rudd plays a man who’ll do anything to get a promotion at work. This includes befriending a socially inept moron (played by Steve Carell) and taking him to a company dinner where the upper class guests pride themselves on making fun of the idiots in the room.
At nearly two hours, Dinner For Schmucks spends most of its running time throwing its two leads into precarious situations, and the actual dinner that makes up the title of the film doesn’t even occur until the last fifteen minutes of the movie. And ironically, the dinner itself is surprisingly short on laughs. As previously stated, there are funny moments peppered throughout Dinner For Schmucks. There’s a really humorous sequence in which Rudd and Carell break into the house of an egomaniacal artist (played by a hilarious Jermaine Clement) who just so happens to have a crush on Rudd’s girlfriend. Of the two leads, Rudd fares best as the straight man to Carell’s dimwit. Problem is we’ve seen Rudd play this type of character to much stronger effect in infinitely better movies (see I Love You Man and Role Models). Carell does what he can to bring the funny, but the material is so labored and contrived that its difficult for him to rise above the obvious mechanics of the screenplay. Dinner For Schmucks was directed by Jay Roach (the man behind the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises), a film maker with a pretty good track record when it comes to comedy. Here, Roach would have been wise to trim this sucker down to ninety minutes. He could have started with losing a painfully unfunny subplot involving Rudd’s stalker of an ex-girlfriend. Furthermore, Dinner For Schmucks tries to pull at the heart strings in the final act, and it never really earns the sincerity its going for. This is a tough one. As much as I enjoy Rudd and Carell, they are much better than the material they’ve been asked to work with. If you’re in the mood for a really funny movie, seek out Cyrus with John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill. It offers up a superior fusion of broad comedy and charm.
— Adam Mast, Zboneman.com
Grade: C
Watch the trailer below.
